Video terror
The series, which has been categorized as a work of "the aesthetics of terror," played a large part in determining Chen's place in the contemporary Taiwanese art world.
In 1998, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum held its first international biennale, curated by Fumio Nanjo and titled "Desire Site." Thirty-six artists from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and China exhibited paintings, sculpture, video installations, and other multimedia works themed around desire.
Chen, who took part, exhibited scanned and enlarged images of punishments. Audiences stood between two walls with embossed plaques, and could hear whispering voices from all directions. It was the feeling of being in hell. The work expressed the absurdity, senselessness, and cruelty of slaughter in a way that was as hard to bear as it was to ignore.
Chen was also invited to exhibit this work at the biennale in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the years that followed, he became one of a very few Taiwanese artists regularly invited to exhibit in international biennales.
In 2002, he continued with his theme of historical punishments with his work Lingchi-Echoes of a Historical Photograph, developing it into short film of silent cruelty.
He based the work on a photograph taken in 1905 at the end of the Qing dynasty by a French soldier of the punishment lingchi, or "death by a thousand cuts." The camera enters the victim's body through two wounds on his chest. It gazes at history through the victim's body and sees traces of lingchi from the past to the present, in such examples as the Japanese Unit 731 that carried out experiments on Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese War, in Taiwan's political prisons, and in heavily polluted factories. The camera also gazes outward from the wounds at the 1905 Western photographer (the spectator) and at contemporary out-of-work laborers.
"Terror is one of the intrinsic qualities of photography," says Chen. Before martial law was lifted in 1987, cruel images from the Rape of Nanjing and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were often displayed in Taiwan's elementary and junior high schools, and images of punishments were impressed on Chen's consciousness from an early age. Some choose to brush aside or forget such images, but he chose to remain true to his life experiences. "That's because what an artist deals with are the issues of society and the times," he says.
Stagnation and mobility
For the 2003 work The Factory, Chen took as his subject unemployed laborers and a long-abandoned factory. He used a semi-documentary style to show the painful history of Taiwan's manufacturing industry in the changing market.
He found two women who had worked for more than 20 years in a Lien Fu textile factory in Taoyuan and returned with them to their worksite. The factory had closed its doors suddenly seven years earlier, and the owners refused to pay retirement or severance pay to its workers. Chen and his team snuck in and filmed the seven years of accumulated dust, stagnant air, and debris such as calendars, newspapers, time clocks, desks, chairs, sewing machines, and fans.
In the film, the workers show the traces of the years gone by on their faces, their trembling hands that threaded needles, and the "emptiness" the factory left in their lives. They make the accusation that after the factory "moved" and abandoned them, the powerless workers were condemned to remain there, wandering aimlessly.
In 2005's Bade Area, the scene is inside a building with a billboard out front advertising an empty commercial space, a familiar sight in many small Taiwanese towns. A few workers wander around in the abandoned factory within, moving obsolete computers back and forth. Over and over, the outlines of their bodies appear in the light and then disappear again into the darkness. Chairs pile up like skeletons until the space is like an abandoned graveyard.
Then, workers climb up onto the overgrown rooftop and wander through dunes of sand. At the bottom is a pool of water, in which pieces of garbage float. It seems that they have long since grown accustomed to it all, and they drink and sing karaoke as they look out over the wasteland. Their lives are like the discarded bottles floating in the waters-they float around on this patch of land, powerless to change their circumstances. They can only go where their environment takes them. They are rootless and without powerful hopes, not to mention dreams.
Chen, who grew up during the period when Taiwan's economy depended on processing and assembly work, says that his sister worked in an electronics factory in Hsintien for 20 years. "I am dealing with an era that has already come to a close, considering the meaning of these life experiences. Though an industry or a factory might come to an end, the people don't disappear. The industry's history may be in the past tense, but the scene and the people are still in the present tense. They can even extend into the future because of their tremendous influence. There are still many people in Taiwan wrapped up in that industrial era who even now cannot escape it."
Video solidarity
In 2006, Chen was invited to the biennale in Liverpool. His The Route, for the Tate Liverpool, deals with a larger, more complex issue-the uphill battle of the labor movement in the face of globalization.
Chen researched the relations between Taiwan and Liverpool online. He found a report of a ship called the Neptune Jade that set sail from Liverpool and was refused entry at ports around the world until it finally ended up in Kaohsiung.
The story began in September, 1995. The British government privatized its ports, and union dockworkers in Liverpool were being replaced with cheap short-term labor. When 20 workers were let go without warning by the Mersey Port Company, the remaining 400 went on strike. In solidarity, longshoremen around the world took to resisting policies of port privatization.
The strike lasted for two years, and the Neptune Jade, which had set sail for Oakland, California, was refused entry in Oakland, Vancouver, Kobe, and Yokohama as workers in ports there refused to unload it out of solidarity. Finally, in October, 1997, it docked at Kaohsiung, and the ship's owners auctioned it and its contents off as one package.
Chen went to Kaohsiung to investigate and discovered that though port workers there had also fought against privatization, they lacked connections with the international labor movement. The workers and the port authority there were completely in the dark about the Neptune Jade.
Chen took the traces of a piece of history and turned them into art, transcending the real outcome with a fictional action and extending the meaning of the strike.
In the 16 minutes of The Route, all is black and white other than the dock's blue warehouse. The camera remains fixed on the longshoremen as they silently pass out placards reading "The world is our picket line," form themselves into a line that passes through the dock's wire fences. Under the sun, beads of sweat roll down their foreheads. Their silence is a form of concentrated power.
"Nobody knew that the end result of this protest happened in Taiwan. When I finished shooting and brought the film to Liverpool, it was symbolic of the way the incident was not over and that culture could keep it alive," Chen says.
Artistic asceticism
Chen creates around one piece a year. It's not much, but each new work generates heated discussion in the specialized world of critics.
However, even though Chen's works are of the currently fashionable film and video installation genres, very few Taiwanese collect such works and his reputation remains stronger than his commercial appeal.
Chen doesn't harbor any complaints about this low level of commercial interest in his work, but he does resent the exploding market for contemporary art of recent years: for decades no one paid any mind to modern Taiwanese art, but only now are things turning around due to "China fever." He says, "It's as if these people are crazy enough to think they can rewrite art history!"
While Chen is not averse to the buying and selling of art, he does see judging the value of art by its price as "perverse." He says that the value of art should be determined by unceasing discussion and critique.
After remaining beneath the radar for years, Chen's works began to be purchased by museums and galleries abroad after 2002 for between 40,000 and 60,000 each. In 2005, Chen signed a five-year representation deal with Main Trend Gallery for NT$1 million per year. His financial situation is finally becoming stable.
"I am amazed that a Taiwanese artist has been able to accomplish works like this! For many years he's lived an ascetic, lonely monk-like lifestyle. Taiwanese society still has some reservations about video art," says Main Trend's general manager Yeh Ming-hsun.
Many people think that Chen has some special talent for gaining more exposure abroad than at home, but actually he just contacts foreign galleries and museums via email. In Europe, there are many opportunities to exhibit and many people involved in the art world. Counting group shows, his works are exhibited abroad 15 to 20 times a year. For an artist who's "doing OK," he says, that's nothing out of the ordinary.
Worker philosopher
Chen, whose art often focuses on the lower classes, looks the part of a rough laborer in his flip-flops, T-shirts, and shorts. But when talking about the aesthetics and meaning expressed in his video, he is quite thoughtful. He says things like, "International capital flows will come to an end, and Marx long ago discussed the alienation of labor," giving him the air of a "worker philosopher."
Recently, he was invited to participate in New Orleans' biennale. Collecting material to use, he came across a topic for discussion. He says that the reason that black and poor people in America often have no choice but to turn to drug dealing, robbery, and gangs is that the system doesn't even allow them the space or opportunity to open a Taiwan-style street stall. "The economic system has to have some flexibility. If the Taiwanese government decided one day to eliminate the underground economy, we'd surely overthrow it because the underground economy is the way for the poor to turn their lives around."
Chen's artistic philosophy comes from his own life experiences. His works often leave a tangled web for viewers. Whether they can find their way through or not depends on their own views on life.
The History of Video Art
In 1965, Sony invents a light, easy to operate portable video camera that allows for recording outside the television studio. Instant playback also provides artists mastery over the imagery they create. In the 1970s, Korean-born American artist Nam June Paik begins creating multimedia art with video, photographs, and sound, such as a work that turns a television into a fish tank, or filming a candle and projecting the image on the wall live. Sometimes abstract and sometimes representational, his strange and beautiful images show the possibilities for collaboration between the worlds of art and science. He becomes known as the father of video art, and video art is accepted in galleries and museums.